It finally happened: Steve Ballmer is stepping down as Microsoft CEO. Who will succeed him? Cringely has a few ideas

InfoWorld|Aug 23, 2013

Today in Redmond the skies are a Windows 95 blue. Somewhere, a midlevel marketing executive is locked inside a bathroom stall weeping quiet tears of joy, and a Herman Miller Aeron chair is tumbling end over end in its inevitable descent to earth.

Like many others, I have pinned the blame for Microsoft's many failings on the man at the top. True, he did what a CEO is supposed to do: make money by the truckload. Microsoft is a cash colossus. But its empire is built on yesterday's technology, and everyone knows it. That's a big reason why its share price, just a hair under $60 when Ballmer took the reins from Gates, is barely more than half that now. And it's probably why Ballmer decided to jump before he was pushed.

To forestall that, I'd like to make a few suggestions to Microsoft's board as to who should replace Ballmer.

Elon Musk. Sure, he's got a few things on his plate: running Tesla, pioneering commercial space flight, engineering a 700-mph rail system between San Francisco and Los Angeles. But what does it really take to run Microsoft, anyway? He can just pencil it into his calendar between fixing our mass transit mess and flying to the moon.